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The animals might embody certain traits. We think of tigers as being ferocious, etc. But to my mind, it was the other way around: the humans embodied certain animal traits.

Yann Martel

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Yann Martel
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 25
Author
Novelist
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Think
Animals
Thinking
Animal
Around
Ferocious
Certain
Embody
Might
Embodied
Humans
Tigers
Mind
Etc
Way
Traits

More quotes by Yann Martel

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But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.
Yann Martel
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Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.
Yann Martel
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The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.
Yann Martel
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It's hard to visualize James Bond without seeing one of the actors who played him. And it's hard to visualize Harry Potter without seeing Daniel Radcliffe. A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.
Yann Martel
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At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far.
Yann Martel
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That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
Yann Martel
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Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
Yann Martel
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Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.
Yann Martel
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Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.
Yann Martel
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I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.
Yann Martel
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I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.
Yann Martel
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Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.
Yann Martel
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I couldn't get Him out of my head. Still can't. I spent three solid days thinking about Him. The more He bothered me, the less I coul forget Him. And the more I learned about Him, the less I wanted to leave Him.
Yann Martel
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It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go.
Yann Martel
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Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing.
Yann Martel
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I have a story that will make you believe in God.
Yann Martel
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I love Canada. Its a wonderful political act of faith that exists atop a breathtakingly beautiful land.
Yann Martel
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If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Yann Martel
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How true is that necessity is the mother of invention, how very true.
Yann Martel
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I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.
Yann Martel